A binaural hearing system comprises two hearing devices which are interconnected in order to exchange information, such as information with regard to the acoustic situation. The exchange of information results in a coordination of the two hearing devices resulting in improved overall performance of the binaural hearing system. For different acoustic situations, for various target speech levels and for positions, it is beneficial to apply optimized adaptive processing strategies. In many acoustic situations, such as clean speech, extremely noisy environments or target speech not at the front, it is desired to apply more independent signal processing on each individual hearing device of the binaural hearing system. In many difficult acoustic situations—such as when a target speech is in the front with a noisy background—, better performance can be obtained by applying more symmetrical signal processing. For any binaural hearing system, power consumption for a link between the two hearing devices is an important limiting factor.
Known binaural hearing systems are described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,604,812, 6,768,802 B1, US 2010/0002887 A1, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,773,763. While the teaching according to U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,812 discloses no information exchange between the hearing devices, resulting in undefined states and therefore leading to discomfort of the binaural hearing system user, the other known solutions have the drawback that a continuous information exchange takes place between the two hearing devices of the binaural hearing system resulting in rather high power consumption.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a binaural hearing system that at least overcomes the above-mentioned drawback.